Past Melog rankings: 2011

Men's tennis in the early 2000's was very different than it is today. From 2000 to 2003, the top spot in the rankings changed hands 13 times, and was held by 7 different players.

In 2004, that changed very abruptly, as Roger Federer embarked on an extraordinarily long stretch of unprecedented dominance. Federer would hold the #1 ranking for over four and a half years in a row. Moreover, a year later, the #2 position was anchored down just as firmly by Rafael Nadal, who held it for three years before finally passing Federer in summer 2008. The two men would exchange #1 again in 2009, and once more in 2010. At the end of the 2010 season, they had held the highest ranking between them for almost seven years in a row, and had combined to win 21 of the last 23 Grand Slam titles.

That level of dominance continued in 2011 - it just wasn't continued by Federer or Nadal. Instead, Novak Djokovic stormed through the calendar, winning 7 titles and amassing 13 wins over top-10 opponents (including multiple victories against Federer, Nadal, and Andy Murray) before absorbing his first loss of the year in the French Open semifinals. He recovered nicely from that setback, going on to win both Wimbledon and the US Open and ending the year with a stunning record of 70-6, including a 12-2 combined mark against Nadal, Federer, and Murray.

The season didn't exactly come out of nowhere; Djokovic had been a top-5 mainstay since 2007. But by the standards of the preceding several years, it was a colossal shakeup in the status quo.

Let's see how the Melog ratings feel about it.

Rafa vs. Rafa

Rafael Nadal won three Grand Slams in 2010. Novak Djokovic won three Grand Slams in 2011. That most basic method of tennis accounting would hold those two years to be equal, but it’s not difficult to see why Melog 75 rates Djokovic's season higher; the Serb simply performed better in the other events.

It is significantly more surprising, however, that Melog also holds Nadal’s own 2011 season, in which he won three tournaments and one Slam, to be better than his 2010, in which he captured seven total titles including the aforementioned three majors. 2011 is generally considered to have been a step back for Nadal, with Djokovic seizing his place at the top of the heap.

So what is Melog thinking? There is a short answer for this, and a long one. Let’s use the long one.

2011 Year in Review

To establish the context for the 2011 rankings, here is a narrative summary of the year in (men’s singles) tennis in 2011. (In hindsight, it would have made more sense to do this post before putting up the rankings. Live and learn.)

2011 Tennis Rankings: 10-1

Just as a refresher before we get back into it, the rankings from 20 up to 11 were:

Feliciano Lopez (5.0)

Gael Monfils (5.3)

John Isner (5.9)

Nicolas Almagro (6.0)

Fernando Verdasco (6.5)

Andy Roddick (7.9)

Gilles Simon (8.0)

Marin Cilic (9.2)

Richard Gasquet (9.4)

Robin Soderling (12.6)

And now, onward and (very far) upward!

2011 Tennis Rankings: Numbers 20 through 11

In the post that completed the introduction of my ranking method for tennis players, I used Stanislas Wawrinka’s 2011 season as the example for the calculations. I did this for three reasons. First, he’s in the news these days, having just won the 2014 Australian Open. Second, he’s currently my favorite player, a position he worked himself into over the course of last season (a fact which made the aforementioned Australian Open gloriously enjoyable).

And third, he comes in 21^st in my 2011 rankings, thereby making him a natural jumping off point for the top 20 players of the year. If you’ll recall, the rankings are presented as the base 10 logarithm of the ratio between the odds of the player in question out-performing the #75 player in the world against the actual draw faced by the player in question, and the odds of the #75 player in the world exceeding the player in question. Wawrinka’s score was 5.0, meaning that this ratio in his case was roughly 100,000 to 1.

Before we get started, a note on the information presented alongside the rankings: Match, set, and service game records are taken from my own database, and may differ from those reported on the ATP website in some cases. I’m including wins and losses in Challenger events, which the ATP doesn't (not that top-20 players generally participate in many of those anyway), and I'm also ignoring what are called dead rubbers in Davis Cup play (matches played after the best-of-five team matchup is already clinched), which the ATP counts.

On to the good stuff (or at least the good stuff precursor) - the second 10 of the 2011 rankings.